It has been a hell of a week. First my contract position ended, then I came down with cold that’s had me drag-ass and expectorating for a few days, and my vet found “concerning” results in the blood work on my dog Avery. To balance this out, Trump has been on an absolute #winning tear as of late.
It’s the Friday LinkSwarm!
Looking to slash the federal government? From David Stockman (yes, that David Stockman) comes some places to start.
Summary of Savings From Headcount and Nondefense Agency Waste Reductions (FY 2029):
100% Elimination of Staffing at 16 Unnecessary Federal Agencies: $11 billion.
50% Staffing Cut at 9 Dubious Federal Agencies: $15 billion.
34% Staff Reduction at All Other Nondefense Departments: $59 billion.
Indirect Overhead savings from nondefense staff reductions and agency eliminations: $45 billion.
Total Nondefense Staff and Overhead Savings: $130 billion.
We begin with a summary of the 16 agencies to be shut down, along with the number of staff positions to be eliminated and the resulting direct employee compensation savings. These agencies are slated for complete elimination because in the context of a roaring fiscal crisis, they are either utterly unnecessary or inappropriate functions of government or comprise activities that are already being handled by other Federal agencies, state and local governments, or the private sector.
Self-evidently, these 16 agency closures would result in only a small down payment against the $2 trillion per year savings goal. Yet it is crucial to start here because each of these agencies represent cases of egregious regulatory excess or Washington-based enterprises that are not remotely the business of the central government in any season, but most especially not during a time when the Federal government is careening toward the fiscal shoals.
Stated differently, the list below comprises a kind of Litmus Test of fiscal resolve.
If these Federal bureaucrats and agencies can’t be eliminated, the prospect for reining in America’s unfolding fiscal calamity is dim indeed.
16 Agencies To Be Eliminated–Staff Cuts and Payroll Savings:
National Endowment for the Arts: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
National Endowment for the Humanities: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
Legal Services Corporation: 800 staff and $128 million savings.
National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA): 600 staff and $96 million savings.
Federal Trade Commission (FTC): 1,125 staff and $180 million savings.
Corporation for Public Broadcasting: 100 staff and $16 million savings.
OSHA: 2,200 staff and $352 million savings.
Consumer Products Safety Commission: 600 staff and $96 million savings.
Agency for Global Media: 1,125 staff and $180 million of savings.
National Endowment for Democracy (NED): 162 staff and $26 million savings.
Education Department: 4,245 staff and $680 million savings.
Consumer Financial Protection Bureau: 1,500 staff and $240 million savings.
Agency for International Development (AID): 10,000 staff and $1.6 billion savings.
FBI: 34,000 staff and $5.4 billion savings.
BATF: 5,300 staff and $848 million savings.
DEA: 9,315 staff and $1.49 billion savings.
Total 16 Agencies To Be Eliminated: 71,000 staff and $11.3 billion savings.
You’re just getting started…
This list of five ways the Biden Administration wasted your money will make your blood boil.
#1 Joe Biden and his minions spent 15 million dollars to distribute “oral contraceptives and condoms” in Afghanistan…
The Biden administration sent $15 million of taxpayer money in distributing “oral contraceptives and condoms” into Afghanistan, according to a private congressional funding notice reviewed by the Washington Free Beacon.
The award, earmarked by the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) last July, transmitted the funds to Afghanistan.
The money was part of a whopping $100 million package for the Middle Eastern country to support the “basic rights and freedoms” of women and girls who were living under Taliban rule.
#2 Even more money was about to be spent on condoms for the Palestinians. It is being reported that the Biden administration “almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza”…
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt also announced on Tuesday that Biden’s administration almost sent $50 million worth of condoms to Gaza, which she called ‘a preposterous waste of taxpayer money!’
‘There was about to be $50 million taxpayer dollars that went out the door to fund condoms in Gaza!’ Leavitt shockingly claimed.
#3 The Biden administration spent $10,000 for an “ice skating drag show” that was focused on climate change…
The 2024 Festivus Waste Report found that the Biden-Harris administration spent over $1 trillion this year, including giving a $10,000 grant to “Beards on Ice” — an ice skating drag show on climate change put on by the Bearded Ladies Cabaret, a self-described “queer cabaret arts organization.”
#4 20 million of our tax dollars were spent on a Sesame Street spin-off in Iraq that was designed to promote “inclusion”…
Additionally, the Agency for International Development (USAID) spent $20 million on a Sesame Street spin-off show in Iraq, titled “Ahlan Simsim,” in an effort to promote “inclusion” and “mutual respect.”
#5 This final example is the most sickening. 1.5 million dollars was spent to study how various species respond to motion sickness. In one of the experiments, holes were actually drilled into the skulls of young kittens. This is evil on a level that I don’t even know how to describe…
About $1.5 million was spent experimenting how different species, such as young female kittens, respond to motion sickness.
According to the report, researchers would strap kittens to a table, where they are spun around in several directions and have holes drilled into their skulls to keep them in place — “and it’s all being done with your money,” Paul writes in the report. “More than one and a half million dollars of it.”
Remember Ruy Teixeira, the prophet of a “permanent Democratic majority” thanks to Hispanic immigration? Now he’s saying that Democrats have made themselves too incompetent to elect.
The Democrats’ electoral problems have received a lot of attention—as they should! Whatever the commitments of a political party, they’ve got to be elected to pursue them. But that can distract attention from what they do when they are elected. Typically that underlies electoral problems that come to the fore and explains why it’s rarely enough for a party to tout their allegedly wonderful values or continually disparage their nefarious political opponents to fix their problems.
In other words, governance is key. You’ve got to run the government well and get things done voters care about if you want those voters to stick with you. And that’s where Democrats have been running into problems—big problems.
Think about it. If you wanted safe streets and public order would your first impulse be to turn to…a Democrat? Or if you wanted a secure, actually-enforced border? How about efficient, effective delivery of public services? Or rapid completion of public projects and infrastructure? Or nonideological public administration?
I don’t think on any of these fronts the reaction of a typical voter would be: “Democrats! Of course, I need Democrats to do all these things because they’re so good at them!” On the contrary, it seems like over time Democrats—both nationally and in many localities where they dominate—have become worse and worse at delivering in these areas. That’s a huge problem because why should voters take Democratic plans to improve their lives seriously if Democrats persist in running government so poorly? Democratic governance is their advertising and the advertising makes the Democratic “product” look pretty bad. So voters don’t want to buy it.
Let’s look at some specific areas. Take safe streets and public order. The Democratic-leaning commentator Noah Smith admits:
In the late 2010s, blue cities brought [a] problem on themselves: urban disorder. Crime rates began rising in 2015, fueled by national unrest. But blue cities didn’t respond by cracking down on crime as they did in the 90s and 00s. Progressives in the late 2010s reviled and rejected “stop-and-frisk”, “broken windows policing”, and other tools that blue cities had used to keep order in previous decades. Instead, they elected a bunch of progressive prosecutors, enacted more permissive policies toward public drug use, passed laws that made it hard to use violence against shoplifters, and sometimes even reduced penalties for minor crimes.
The result was entirely predictable. Blue cities became increasingly afflicted by pervasive, low-level urban disorder—drug needles in children’s parks, epidemics of car break-ins, and so on. Female friends of mine in San Francisco started to report being followed for blocks, harassed on the train, or even slapped in the head by street people on their way to work. The housing crunch made the disorder much worse, of course, by exacerbating homelessness.
Then the pandemic and the riots hit, and the trend got turbocharged. Without “eyes on the street” to deter crime, and with police cowed or disgruntled by the protests of summer 2020, progressive cities became increasingly lawless, chaotic zones. Violent crime soared in 2020-21, with waves of attacks on vulnerable populations like Asian elders….
Many progressives believe that any actions to curb urban disorder—restrictions on sidewalk tents, making people pay for public transit, arresting people for nonviolent crime, and so on—represent the exclusion of marginalized people from public life. In the absence of a full-service cradle-to-grave welfare state, progressives think they can redistribute urban utility from the rich to the poor by basically letting anyone do anything they want.
Opinions vary about how much things have improved in blue cities since their nadir. But the fundamental problem is: this never should have happened in the first place. And the culprit is well-articulated by Smith in the last paragraph of the quote above. Blue city Democrats have adopted a philosophy that is antithetical to good governance—it is not surprising it does not produce good governance; it is not intended to. Public order is treated as optional, subordinate to ideological goals Democrats wish to pursue. Until that philosophy changes in a big way and Democrats unapologetically and aggressively enforce public order, voters will continue to view Democratic governance negatively in this area. And they’ll be right to do so.
Instead of helping the Democratic Party, the massive influx of Hispanic illegal aliens is dooming it:
Voters also see de facto open borders and uncontrolled immigration on Democrats’ watch as symptoms of public disorder and poor governance. In their view, illegal (Democrats cannot even bring themselves to use the word) immigrants are in fact breaking the law by making unauthorized entry to the United States and creating a chaotic situation at our nation’s border. And they were shocked that almost all candidates for the 2020 Democratic presidential nomination endorsed decriminalizing illegal border crossings.
And then, even more astonishingly to the typical voter, these law-breakers were rewarded for their behavior on the Democrats’ watch. Consider what happened when Biden came into office in 2021. He immediately issued executive orders dramatically loosening the rules for handling illegal immigrants. His party’s left wing and various immigration advocacy groups rapturously applauded this. As The New York Times’ David Leonhardt summarized:
Biden tried to pause deportations. He changed the definition of asylum to include fear of gang violence. He used immigration parole—which the law says should be used “on a case-by-case basis for urgent humanitarian reasons”—to admit hundreds of thousands of people. The parole programs alone amounted to “the largest expansion of legal immigration in modern U.S. history,” Camilo Montoya-Galvez of CBS News wrote.
Would-be migrants, as well as the Mexican cartels that run transit networks, heard a clear message: Entering the United States had become easier. The number of people attempting to do so spiked almost immediately.
And continued to spike throughout the first three and a half years of the Biden administration until they finally took some steps to stanch the tide. But by that time the country had experienced truly mind-boggling levels of immigration. Indeed, the Biden immigration surge, driven heavily by illegals, was the largest in US history, surpassing even the immigration surges of the late 1800s and early 1900s.
Predictably, this dramatic surge in illegal immigration and the diffusion of immigrants into overburdened cities countrywide caused a spike in the issue’s salience and negative sentiment toward Biden and the Democrats for letting the situation get out of control (where it remains to this day). In voters’ view, this was very poor governance indeed.
Leonhardt identifies the ideological roots of the Democrats’ cavalier attitude toward border security and tolerance of illegal immigration:
To many Democrats, support for immigration had come to feel like a moral imperative. Immigration lifted people out of poverty. It enhanced the country’s cultural diversity. It reflected a universalist belief in equality, regardless of a person’s country of origin…
In the 2000s, the Democratic Party…moved even closer to a universalist position. Democrats now speak more positively about immigration than any party has in the country’s history, according to an analysis of the Congressional Record. Many liberals have grown uncomfortable talking about restrictions and criticize both Clinton and Barack Obama for their positions. Obama combined full-throated support for immigrants, including legalization for many who were undocumented, with support for border security. When “an employer undercuts American wages by hiring illegal workers,” Obama said, it violates America’s promise.
Top Democrats would not make such an argument today. They are also unlikely to revere assimilation, as [Barbara] Jordan [black Texas Democrat, who chaired a 1990s commission on immigration policy] did. To universalists, glorifying American culture is jingoistic…
Today, immigration is the one issue on which even the left flank of the Democratic Party continues to support the neoliberal position. Democrats have grown more skeptical of deregulation and the free flow of trade than they were during the Clinton years. But they have grown even more supportive of the deregulated flow of people across borders. Many liberals are passionately universalist on the subject….
Because of this discomfort [with deciding who should be legally admitted to the country and who should not], the modern Democratic Party has struggled to articulate an immigration policy beyond what might be summarized as: More is better, and less is racist. The party has cast aside the legacies of Jordan and other progressives who made finer distinctions.
There you have it. Democrats have developed a philosophy about immigration that prizes ideological commitments over the mundane realities of a secure border, public order and enforcement of the law. Until Democrats decisively reject that philosophy and show by their actions that they are committed to stopping illegal immigration with every tool at government’s disposal and restoring order to the immigration system, voters will continue to regard Democratic governance in this area as very poor indeed. And who can blame them?
According to a press release from the United States Attorney’s Office, Middle District of Florida, a 39-year-old Orlando man named Matthew A. Inman has been arrested and charged with “transportation of child sex abuse material.” If convicted, he’ll face between five and twenty years in jail. Though when you hear the details, you may agree with me that this doesn’t seem like nearly enough time behind bars for this guy.
The press release continues:
According to the complaint, between August and October of 2024, Inman received and saved several videos of child sexual abuse material (CSAM) to his phone. These videos depicted adults sexually assaulting young children. In October 2024, Inman traveled to Las Vegas and began talking online with an undercover law enforcement officer posing as the father of a 9-year-old boy. During this conversation, Inman expressed interest in meeting and sexually assaulting the purported child. He also sent CSAM videos to the undercover officer.
The FBI obtained a search warrant for Inman’s electronic devices and residence. During the execution of the search warrant, Inman attempted to delete the evidence from his phone and hide in the attic of his house.
A criminal complaint is merely a formal charge that a defendant has committed one or more violations of federal criminal law, and every defendant is presumed innocent unless, and until, proven guilty.
This case was investigated by the FBI. It is being prosecuted by Assistant United States Attorney Richard Varadan.
According to Spectrum News 13, “Inman was arrested by the U.S. Marshals, and he is currently in the Seminole County Jail with no bond.”
Fox 35 in Orlando reports that Inman worked for Visit Orlando, according to his LinkedIn profile. He served as the manager of business affairs. He’s also been the treasurer for the Orange County Democratic Party since July 2023 and president of the Rainbow Democrats since 2021.
A threat of a trade war causes the President of Columbia to back down in less than 10 hours about taking illegal alien deportees out.
Wow:
Trump approval currently has NO racial demographic signal. Wild!
White – 55% Black – 57% Hisp/oth – 58%
— Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen Reports (@Mark_R_Mitchell) January 23, 2025
Never mind. “The mysterious drones spotted in northern New Jersey late last year were authorized by the Federal Aviation Administration FAA and were not dispatched by foreign enemies of the U.S., the White House confirmed on Tuesday, ending months of speculation.”
“Dallas City Council Member’s Re-Election Bid Halted by Term Limit Charter Amendment. The city secretary denied Carolyn King Arnold’s application for candidacy.” Bonus: Arnold is a convicted felon.
“Trump to Cancel Student Visas of Pro-Hamas Protesters. The executive order is directed toward international students who participated in pro-Hamas protests.” If you come to America to get an education, do that. We have quite enough domestically grown Jew-haters on the left as it is; we don’t need to import any more.
Facebook/Meta is in talks to get the hell out of Delaware and reincorporate in Texas, largely based on what a Delaware judge has done to Elon Musk. Seems like Delaware incorporation doesn’t provide the slam-dunk legal protection it used to.
Here’s one of those headlines that make you stop in your tracks. “Fort Worth ISD Adopts New Strategic Plan to Address Student ‘Literacy Crisis.'”
Yes, if you’re a school district, and your students aren’t literate, that is indeed a crisis. It’s like going to Popeye’s and having them tell you they’re out of fried chicken.
“The new plan encompasses five years and focuses on four major issues, including literacy.” Here’s a suggestion: Why not drop the other three issues until you’ve got that pesky “teaching children to read” thing nailed down?
The Fort Worth Independent School District (ISD) board has approved a new strategic plan to address the district’s poor academic performance and particularly severe literacy issues.
On January 21, board members and four Fort Worth City Council members held a conference before that night’s school district board meeting to call for prioritizing literacy in schools, particularly for students to be reading at grade level.
Fort Worth Mayor Pro Tem Gina Bivens said, “Without literacy, children face barriers to free speech, participation in the democratic process, and equal protection under the law. Denying them this skill denies them opportunity.”
Ya think?
Interim Superintendent Karen Molinar said, “The literacy crisis in Fort Worth and Tarrant County demands our immediate attention. With so many students falling below reading standards, literacy must be central to our strategic plan.”
This rather suggests that literacy wasn’t getting Fort Worth ISD’s “immediate attention” before, doesn’t it?
Board Member Anael Luebanos said, “As a Board, we have a responsibility to act. The parents of more than 70,000 students have entrusted us with their children’s futures. We must have a singular focus: ensuring every student reads at grade level.”
So what was Fort Worth ISD concentrating on before instead of literacy? Would you believe DEI?
In 2022, over protesting parents, [Fort Worth ISD] hired a social justice superintendent eager to impose DEI on the district.
As parents fight back against racist ideologies in their children’s schools, Fort Worth ISD’s newly minted superintendent, Dr. Angélica Ramsey, announced at a breakfast meeting that the system needs to be “reinvented” because “the truth is that black, brown, and poor kids in this country do not get the education they deserve because we’re in a system that wasn’t built for us.”
According to Ramsey, who has a history of supporting the “diversity, equity, and inclusion” agenda, “we integrated into their system, not the other way around.”
Ramsey’s 2013 doctoral dissertation on “the experiences of Latina principals in both established and burgeoning Latina/o communities in raising Latina/o achievement” promotes her research as “championing the causes of equity and student success for all with a social justice agenda.”
Ramsey resigned under heavy pressure last year. So after two-odd years of that super-genius social justice leadership, Fort Worth ISD now has a “literacy crisis.”
Everyone who had a hand in inflicting social justice on the American education system needs to be purged. Let them pick up litter along America’s highways, or create whimsical foam latte shapes. In no way, shape or form should any of them be allowed to warp the minds of children ever again.
s part of his flurry of initial executive actions, President Trump released an executive order titled “Ending Illegal Discrimination and Restoring Merit-Based Opportunity.” It is no mere public relations statement but a long and carefully drafted order that, if upheld and properly executed, will eliminate the blight of racially preferential treatment in the federal government; it also seeks boldly (and likely less successfully) to eliminate it from our culture at large by applying indirect pressure.
The order is truly sweeping in its breadth; its immediate effect is to uproot with one stroke the vast bulk of the federal infrastructure of affirmative action and DEI protocols and hiring practices. This is an edifice that was built up painstakingly over decades by one Democratic executive order after another, dating all the way back to the Johnson administration’s infamous 1965 Executive Order 11246, which first established “affirmative action” as a necessary criterion in government hiring and contracting decisions: Any company doing business with the federal government from that day forward has been required to comply with what the Equal Employment Opportunity Commission deems to be racially equitable in terms of hiring, salary, or promotion practices, or else take their case to court.
Now it is no more. E.O. 11246 has been repealed, along with four other Obama- and Clinton-era orders which implemented it. Companies contracting with the federal government will no longer be required by the Department of Labor to address racial or sexual “underrepresentation” with formal affirmative action plans. The federal government will now be commanded to immediately cease promoting “diversity,” cease “holding Federal contractors and subcontractors responsible for taking ‘affirmative action,’” and cease “allowing or encouraging Federal contractors and subcontractors to engage in workforce balancing based on race, color, sex, sexual preference, religion, or national origin.”
As anyone familiar with the current government contracting process is aware, shedding the cumbersome, expensive, and deeply unjust DEI “compliance” requirements will be an instantaneous victory not only for justice but also for the effectiveness of our government. But Trump’s executive order does not limit itself to undoing the mistakes of the past; it is aggressively forward-looking as well. In the past, government contractors had to promise compliance with affirmative action under penalty of nonpayment, but now they are required to sign terms certifying they do not “operate any programs promoting DEI that violate any applicable Federal anti-discrimination laws.”
Trump also makes clear his intent to apply painful public and government pressure on private-sector DEI practices as well, and does not cloak his reasons. As part of a section explicitly titled “Encourage the Private Sector to End Illegal DEI Discrimination and Preferences,” the order directs agency heads to compile lists of public companies, universities, and large foundations in order to name and shame “the most egregious and discriminatory DEI practitioners in each sector of concern” and consider civil-compliance investigations and possible civil action over their DEI programs. Furthermore, Section 5 of the E.O. puts higher education on notice that these rules will be applied to any college or university that receives federal grant money or participates in the federal student-loan assistance program — functionally speaking, every major university in America. (The order specifically states the Trump administration’s intent to force colleges to comply with the Supreme Court’s ruling in Students for Fair Admissions v. Harvard (2023), the landmark case striking down racial discrimination in public and private college admissions.)
Naturally, several aspects of this momentous executive order will be fiercely litigated. But expect the bulk of it to stand, and stand as a major achievement for Trump’s second term. The government’s ruinous racial policies over the past half century were created primarily by executive order, not legislation, and what was done with the mere stroke of a presidential pen can be undone by the same means.
Meanwhile, discriminatory practices have spread throughout academia and the private sector. The architects of this system have used legerdemain and moral bullying — especially the accusation of racism — to preserve and steadily extend it, even when it means defying the law. Now, President Trump wants to smoke them out.
President Trump on Monday night signed an executive order that is expected to eventually disqualify transgender individuals from serving or enlisting in the military on grounds of mental unfitness.
The order does not immediately bar transgender individuals from serving in the military, but directs the Pentagon to develop a policy on transgender service members within 30 days that prioritizes readiness. The current policy, according to the order, is “inconsistent with the medical, surgical, and mental health constraints on individuals with gender dysphoria.”
Gender dysphoria, the order states, is a mental condition that comes with bodily consequences that are incompatible with active duty and “conflicts with a soldier’s commitment to an honorable, truthful, and disciplined lifestyle, even in one’s personal life.” Those struggling with it “cannot satisfy the rigorous standards necessary for military service,” the order states.
The order also reverses the Biden administration’s policy of allowing existing trans service members to receive coverage for transition-related medical procedures and bars those service members from sharing bathrooms, bedrooms, and changing areas with members of the opposite sex.
On his first day in office, Trump signed an order revoking the Biden administration’s 2021 directive that allowed transgender people to serve in the military while his administration prepared more comprehensive guidance. The new order explains that admitting trans soldiers is a liability to military lethality, which is necessary to protect and defend America from foreign enemies. Those who receive so-called treatment for gender dysphoria often become permanent patients of a medical industry, signing up for lifetime follow-up appointments that jeopardize deployability, or the ability of a service member to be deployed at sudden notice when duty calls.
The order points out that transgender individuals often seek medical procedures that leave them physically unable to perform for extended periods.
The order notes that transgenderism is also a mental illness that can interfere with military performance. Transgender risk of suicide is also a significant concern, as 81% of transgender adults in the U.S. have thought about suicide and 42 percent of transgender adults have attempted it, according to a 2023 study from the Williams Institute at UCLA School of Law.
“To ensure we have the most lethal fighting force in the world, we will get transgender ideology the hell out of our military,” Trump said at a retreat with House Republicans on Monday. “It’s going to be gone.”
Texans are applauding President Donald Trump’s executive order putting an end to radical gender ideology within the federal government and restoring the “biological truth” that there are only two sexes: male and female.
The executive order is entitled “Defending Women From Gender Ideology Extremism and Restoring Biological Truth to the Federal Government.”
Conservative activist Tracy Shannon—an outspoken critic of harmful “transgender” ideology and a well-known advocate within the Texas Legislature—called Trump’s executive order “great news.”
But she cautions the federal order does not completely kill the trans political movement, and work is still needed at the state and local levels.
“We need the legislation he is calling for to close the loopholes and put the nail in the coffin of this insidious and cancerous ideology,” Shannon posted on X.
“It isn’t going to just go away overnight,” she added. “It is not over yet.”
The executive order, signed by Trump on his first day back in office along with dozens of other orders, states:
Efforts to eradicate the biological reality of sex fundamentally attack women by depriving them of their dignity, safety, and well-being. The erasure of sex in language and policy has a corrosive impact not just on women but on the validity of the entire American system.
Basing Federal policy on truth is critical to scientific inquiry, public safety, morale, and trust in government itself.
“It is the policy of the United States to recognize two sexes, male and female. These sexes are not changeable and are grounded in fundamental and incontrovertible reality,” Trump’s order reads. “Under my direction, the Executive Branch will enforce all sex-protective laws to promote this reality…”
The order defines “sex” as “an individual’s immutable biological classification,” either male or female, that does not include the concept of “gender identity.”
All federal agencies and employees are ordered to use the term “sex” and not “gender” in all applicable federal policies and documents.
Boom! I’ve only been pushing for the restoration of the hard-coded “sex” over the intentionally nebulous “gender” forever.
It’s a great week to be a conservative…or anyone of any political stripe who is a part of the reality-based community…
Disney is in a weird place right now. They’ve sort of, kind of, announced that (like most of the rest of corporate America) they’re backing away from wokeness, to the extent that they’re cutting woke storylines from Pixar properties, and Disney was able to course correct in enough time to make Moana 2 and Inside Out 2 big hits last year (plus Deadpool & Wolverine, which I suspect was too rude to ever be infected with wokeness), but the company itself is still infected with DEI, and they still have an awful lot of very expensive turds, conceived and crafted in the woke era, sliding down the alimentary release canal.
First up: Captain America: Brave New World, due to plop out February 14 (because it’s just perfect Valentine’s Day fare) after numerous poor test screenings. Re-shoots have reportedly pumped the budget up to a staggering $375 million, which would put it among the ten most expensive films of all time and means that, by traditional Hollywood metrics, the film would have to take in close to a billion dollars to make a profit. It’s not even remotely on track for that.
“It’s tracking round about the same level as The Eternals at the moment.” “Not a win.” The Eternals made $402 million worldwide, which would be a financial disaster for Captain America: Brave New World.
But that’s not the only woke-era disaster cued up for Disney, as the widely reviled live-action Snow White remake is coming out in March. Honestly, all this is just an excuse to post this video featuring comments on the Snow White trailer…sung and set to music.
So that’s two expensive, high profile bombs Disney has to flush out of the system before they can release movies that have better than a snowball’s chance in Hell of making a profit. Disney’s streaming business is finally profitable, but that’s after $11 billion worth of losses to recoup. Park revenue was up, but profits from it down. And ESPN profit has been down enough that they laid off some 300 staffers, part of a $7.5 billion cost-cutting effort introduced by Iger. But that didn’t keep Iger’s own compensation from increasing to $41.1 million, up 30% from FY2023.
Because I’m such a helpful, big-hearted fellow, I’m going to start a series where I tell Democrats how to find their way out of their current slough of despond. But since I’m so very, very tired of their useless shit, and of them making the same mistakes over and over again, I’m going to give said advice in a way that brutally goosesteps all over their precious feel-feels, ensuring that they will stop reading reading it in a fit of blind rage, which will in turn make them incapable of learning from it, ensuring that they continue to make the same mistakes over and over again.
I’m tricksy that way.
This first big lesson: Abandon the fucking idiot woke social justice warrior bullshit
All of it.
ALL. OF. IT.
That’s going to be the overarching lesson for the first few of these. But because there’s so much social justice bullshit, I’m going to have to break these lessons up to cover different types of social justice warrior bullshit.
Lesson the First: Abandon your transsexual madness.
Cut out all the transsexual bullshit. Sex is not a social construct. There are two sexes, male and female. If you have XY chromosomes, you are male. If you have XX chromosomes, you are female. A man cannot make himself into a woman by any means, and certainly not by simply declaring he’s a woman. Stop pretending otherwise. Stop pretending that “gender” is “fluid.” Stop pretending that a few odd genetic corner cases give you permission to pretend a man wearing a dress is a woman. Stop enabling mental illness. We’re not playing anymore.
Get your fucking child-mutilating hands off children. If you insane, mentally ill perverts want to mutilate your own damn body, fine. Not my circus, not my monkeys. But when you start mutilating the genitalia of children and start sterilizing children for life, fuck you and every one of your virtue-signaling comrades and expect to lose every election between now and the heat death of the universe.
Stop putting men pretending to be women into women’s prisons. Democrats go to great lengths to assure the public they’re against rape, but when it comes down to preventing rape or enabling their virtue signaling, Democratic prison officials across the country have decided they’re just fine and dandy with rape. Just as with UK’s Labour government being just fine with systemic child rape of British women by unassimilated Muslim immigrants in the Rotherham et. al. scandals being an acceptable price to pay for more “multicultural” voters, so too the Democratic Party seems to think repeated rape of incarcerated women by male felons claiming to be woman is necessary for the greater glory of “social justice.”
Stop asking government to pay for “sex change operations” for illegal aliens and convicted felons. Remember how Kamala Harris’ promise to pay for sex changes for illegal aliens in 2020 came back to bite her in the ass in 2024. Like I said, if you freaks want to pay to mutilate yourself, we don’t give a rat’s ass. But when ordinary people are having trouble paying for food because of the lingering inflation from the Biden Recession, they get angry when you use their tax dollars to pay for idiot virtue-signaling bullshit. Ditto Julian Castro’s absurd pimping of “transgender abortion.”
Cut out the bullshit euphemisms. Mutilating a child’s genitalia isn’t “gender affirming care,” it’s evil perversion we will hold you to account for performing. Likewise:
Stop pretending that refusing to indulge in the mentally ill delusion that someone is a different sex than the one they were born with is “literally killing them.” “Do what I say or I’ll kill myself” has never been a morally acceptable threat, and studies show that mutilating people in the name of “gender affirming care” doesn’t decrease the risk of suicide. Quite the opposite: “The results of this study indicate that patients who have undergone gender affirmation surgery are associated with significantly higher risks of suicide, self-harm, and PTSD compared to general population control groups.”
Stop demanding pronouns. That means you, corporate American. We’re not playing your woke bullshit games any more, and if you keep trying to force that down our throats, expect to see employees, customers and federal contracts all dry up.
Stop pandering to the non-existent “modern” transsexual shopper. All their weird breast-binding and size 14 women shoe needs can probably be served by a single mail order house somewhere in New York or San Francisco. Pull that virtue signaling crap out of your store and put in merchandise that people actually want. That means you, Target. And if you’re aiming that shit at children, expect to see ordinary Americans actively work to see that you go bankrupt.
Stop letting men play women’s athletics. The average man is stronger and faster than the average woman, and among athletes this male advantage is even more greatly pronounced, and in contact sports like boxing the advantage is so overwhelming that pretending otherwise creates an active danger to the life and health of a woman trying to compete against a biological man. The Biden Administration’s perversion of Title IX has already been found unconstitutional and is deeply unpopular among the parents of girls participating in high school and college athletes. Why is the Democratic Party so obsessed with alienating vast swathes of the American voting public in order to pander to the laughable delusions of a small number of low value males who are incapable of beating other men and need to wrest some sort of sick gratification from beating smaller and weaker girls by pretending to be female?
Remember, Democrats, Step 1 is admitting you have a problem. Wokeness and social justice in general, and transsexual madness in specific, are a battleship-anchor around your neck. The sane majority of ordinary Americans are more than happy to see it drag you down to the bottom of the ocean, but self preservation would suggest you just might want to consider pulling your head out of your ass, changing course, and leaving the freakshow of transsexual madness behind.
As I’ve mentioned before, I don’t have a use case for owning a Cybertruck (or any electric car or truck), but for a supposedly unpopular vehicle, I actually see a lot of them on the road. (Of course, I’m only a mile from a Tesla sales office, so your mileage may vary.) But one of the the Cybertruck’s selling features is that it’s bulletproof. Well, Brandon Herrera (who owns a Cybertruck) decided to see how bullet-proof, though he’s using a detached Cybertruck door rather than his own vehicle.
Spoilers: It seems pretty bulletproof to handgun ammo up the .45 ACP, but once he stepped up to the .44 Magnum Desert Eagle (“the Cybertruck’s only known natural predator”) and the bigger rifle rounds (including 5.5.6 NATO and even, for grins, a .50 BMG round out of his very own AK-50), it was bulletproof no more.
Mary Elise Cosgray of The Texan sent out a guide to the Texas congressional delegation via email, and I thought it was chock-full of useful information for Texas voters to know who’s serving on what, so I’m putting it up as a PSA post here.
Sen. John Cornyn (R-TX): Committee on Finance, Ranking Member on Subcommittee on International Trade, Customs, and Global Competitiveness, Subcommittee on Energy, Natural Resources, and Infrastructure, Subcommittee on Taxation and IRS Oversight
Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX): Ranking Member on Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, Committee on Foreign Relations, Subcommittee on Western Hemisphere, Transnational Crime, Civilian Security, Democracy, Human Rights, & Global Women’s Issues, Subcommittee on Near East, South Asia, Central Asia, and Counterterrorism, Subcommittee on State Department & USAID Management, International Operations, & Bilateral International Development
Rep. Nathaniel Moran (R-TX-01): Committee on Ways and Means
Rep. Dan Crenshaw (R-TX-02): Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Committee on Energy and Commerce
Rep. Keith Self (R-TX-03): Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
Rep. Pat Fallon (R-TX-04): Committee on Armed Services, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Rep. Lance Gooden (R-TX-05): Committee on Armed Services, Committee on the Judiciary
Rep. Jake Ellzey (R-TX-06): Committee on Appropriations, Committee on Small Business
Rep. Lizzie Fletcher (D-TX-07): Committee on Energy and Commerce
Rep. Morgan Luttrell (R-TX-08): Committee on Armed Services, Committee on Homeland Security, Committee on Veterans’ Affairs
Rep. Al Green (D-TX-09): Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Michael McCaul (R-TX-10): Committee on Homeland Security
Rep. August Pfluger (R-TX-11): Committee on Energy and Commerce, Committee on Homeland Security
Rep. Craig Goldman (R-TX-12): Committee on Energy and Commerce
Rep. Ronny Jackson (R-TX-13): Committee on Agriculture, Committee on Armed Services, Committee on Foreign Affairs, Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence
Rep. Randy Weber (R-TX-14): Committee on Energy and Commerce, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
Rep. Monica De La Cruz (R-TX-15): Committee on Agriculture, Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Veronica Escobar (D-TX-16): Committee on Appropriations
Rep. Pete Session (R-TX-17): Committee on Financial Services, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Rep. Sylvester Turner (D-TX-18): Committee on Homeland Security, Committee on Science, Space, and Technology
Rep. Jodey Arrington (R-TX-19): Committee on Foreign Affairs
Rep. Joaquin Castro (D-TX-20): Committee on Foreign Affairs
Rep. Chip Roy (R-TX-21): Committee on Rules, Committee on the Judiciary
Rep. Troy Nehls (R-TX-22): Committee on the Judiciary, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Rep. Tony Gonzales (R-TX-23): Committee on Appropriations, Committee on Homeland Security
Rep. Beth Van Duyne (R-TX-24): Committee on Ways and Means, Committee on Small Business
Rep. Roger Williams (R-TX-25): Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Brandon Gill (R-TX-26): Committee on the Judiciary, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Rep. Michael Cloud (R-TX-27): Committee on Appropriations, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Rep. Henry Cuellar (D-TX-28): Committee on Appropriations
Rep. Sylvia Garcia (D-TX-29): Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Jasmine Crockett (D-TX-30): Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, Committee on the Judiciary
Rep. John Carter (R-TX-31): Committee on Appropriations
Rep. Julie Johnson (D-TX-32): Committee on Foreign Affairs, Committee on Homeland Security
Rep. Marc Veasey (D-TX-33): Committee on Energy and Commerce
Rep. Vicente Gonzalez (D-TX-34): Committee on Financial Services
Rep. Greg Casar (D-TX-35): Committee on Education and Workforce, Committee on Oversight and Government Reform
Rep. Brian Babin (R-TX-36): Committee on Science, Space, and Technology, Committee on Transportation and Infrastructure
Rep. Lloyd Doggett (D-TX-37): Committee on Ways and Means
Rep. Wesley Hunt (R-TX-38): Committee on Natural Resources, Committee on the Judiciary
Democrats used election fraud and lawfare to strike down a glad-handing, dealmaking Trump the Grey who was treated with deep suspicion by the Republican establishment, and now he’s returned, more powerful than ever, as Trump the White with a unified GOP behind him, someone who has already unleashed a executive order blitzkrieg the likes of which the nation has never seen before. Trump now threatens the Democrats’ one-ring control of the federal bureaucracy, not to mention black and Hispanic voters, in a way previous Republican presidents never did. And Democrats have only themselves to blame for it, not only for their radical, shrieking TDS obstruction in his first term and their radical embrace of a deeply unpopular social justice agenda, but also their use of overreach in using so many executive orders to achieve their agenda. Now Trump has the blueprint and precedent to go after all their power centers. The scope and ferocity of Trump’s assault on a permanent leftwing deep state makes it seem less like The War of the Ring than The War of Wrath, in which the Valar returned to Middle Earth to finally settle Morgoth’s hash once and for all.
OK, I’ll stop making Tolkien analogies now.
Let’s just say that Trump’s first week back in the White House has unleashed a blizzard of winning, and I haven’t even remotely corralled all of it here.
In his final minutes as president, Joe Biden issued preemptive pardons to his two brothers, James and Francis, and his sister, Valerie, to protect them from what he predicts will be politically motivated attacks led by President-elect Donald Trump and Republicans.
“My family has been subjected to unrelenting attacks and threats, motivated solely by a desire to hurt me—the worst kind of partisan politics,” Biden said in a statement. “Unfortunately, I have no reason to believe these attacks will end.”
Biden used his presidential power to pardon five members of his immediate family: James, his wife Sara, Valerie, her husband John Owens, and Francis. The outgoing president said the pardons “should not be mistaken as an acknowledgment that they engaged in any wrongdoing, nor should acceptance be misconstrued as an admission of guilt for any offense.”
James and Sara, in particular, were pardoned, presumably because James wrote Joe a $200,000 check on March 1, 2018 — the same day he received the funds from distressed rural hospital provider Americore.
In September 2017, James and his wife also sent his older brother a $40,000 check that used funds originating from a Chinese energy firm CEFC in addition to other transactions involving Joe that caught the attention of the Republican-led House Oversight and Judiciary Committees. Both checks were classified as loan repayments.
The other family members were pardoned to ensure they aren’t targeted by the incoming administration. The clemency act covers any nonviolent offenses they may have committed since January 1, 2014.
Like running an illegal pay-for-play graft mill for foreign governments. Which is what the Biden Crime Family did.
The federal government’s method of searching through information incidentally collected on U.S.-based individuals violates the U.S. Constitution’s Fourth Amendment, a federal judge has ruled.
“To countenance this practice would convert Section 702 into precisely what Defendant has labeled it – a tool for law enforcement to run ‘backdoor searches’ that circumvent the Fourth Amendment,” U.S. District Judge LaShann Dearcy Hall said in the ruling, which was released on Jan. 21.
Government officials acquired information on the defendant, Agron Hasbajrami, a legal permanent resident who they arrested in 2011 and charged with providing material support to a terrorist organization. The information was gathered under the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA), which lets authorities spy on people.
After Hasbajrami pleaded guilty, authorities disclosed that some of the evidence they used in the case was the fruit of information they obtained without a warrant under a FISA supplement called Section 207, which enables authorities to conduct surveillance on non-U.S. persons reasonably believed to be outside the United States.
Donald Trump won the 2024 election in part because the Left’s hysterical style of attacking Trump no longer worked.
After a decade of this unhinged furor, it proved worthless in winning public support — and for two simple reasons.
One, after years of Russian collusion hoaxes, the laptop disinformation farce, and the warped lies about the “suckers” and “fine people on both sides” — the shrill Left became predictable.
So, the bored public began tuning them out, switching channels, hitting the mute button, and pulling the plug.
Like the deleterious effects of inflation that eventually render a currency worthless, nonstop hectoring, hysterics, pontification, and distortion finally made all such criticisms of Trump mostly as valueless as 1930s German marks.
Second, the wearied public never heard reasoned counterarguments from the likes of a Rachel Maddow. Instead, on spec, she kept mouthing, “The walls are closing in” on Trump.
Former President Joe Biden did not explain why his open border was a better idea than Trump’s closed one. He preferred mumbling about “semi-fascists!” and the “ultra-MAGA!”
The Never Trumpers did not critique the Trump deficits. Instead, they hammered away that Trump was Hitler, or Mussolini, or Putin — or just a dangerous dictator or autocrat.
Angry retired generals never demonstrated why Trump was, in their view, an existential threat to democracy. Instead, they shouted nonstop in op-eds and interviews that he was a fascist, Nazi-like, no different from the guards at Auschwitz, a pathological liar, and should be summarily removed.
Worn-out voters began to understand that these psychodramas were substitutes for substantive criticism or occasions for legitimate debate.
Indeed, the exhausted public finally concluded that the hysterics increased in direct proportion to the poverty of the charges.
So, what did 10 years of such derangement achieve for the Left?
Trump now has control of the White House and both houses of Congress operate under Republican majorities.
The Supreme Court is mostly conservative. Almost all of Trump’s issues — the border, immigration, the economy, foreign policy, and crime — poll well over 50 percent.
No matter, the Left is still hammering away at the trivial and irrelevant — and remains paralyzed in furor and hysterics.
Former Okaland mayor Sheng Thao was “indicted [last] Friday. Also indicted: Andre Jones, who the NYT describes as her ‘boyfriend,’ David Trung Duong, and Andy Hung Duong. David Duong is the head of a local waste management company, and Andy is his son.”
“Starbucks Lost $25 Million Lawsuit Because They Fired An Employee For Being White.” Good. Don’t be racist and don’t violate anti-discrimination laws. It’s not rocket science.
Left UK Guardian newspaper staffers: We’re striking for better wages! Guardian management: Enjoy being replaced by AI.
And another huge Russian oil facility goes up in a giant fireball, this one in Ryazan, some 476 kilometers from the Ukrainian border.
Biden: Stop attacking American ships. Houthis: LOL. Trump: Stop attacking American ships…or else. Houthis: “Yes, Mr. President. Please don’t kill us.”
“West Texas Teacher, Coach Charged With Continuous Sexual Assault of a Child. Justin Esquell is accused of sexually abusing a victim for four years, starting when the child was under the age of 14.”
This could be a very big story. “Trump Announces Tech Companies Will Invest $500 Billion in AI Infrastructure.”
President Donald Trump on Tuesday announced a joint venture between three large tech companies to invest as much as $500 billion into building out U.S. artificial intelligence infrastructure.
The joint venture, known as Stargate, involves Oracle, Open AI, and Softbank and will see the companies join together to build out American data centers to power artificial intelligence systems, including ChatGPT. Stargate, which could cost up to $500 billion over a four-year period, will begin with a data center in Texas, a state friendly to crypto and other parts of the tech industry.
The initial equity funders in Stargate are SoftBank, OpenAI, Oracle, and MGX. SoftBank and OpenAI are the lead partners for Stargate, with SoftBank having financial responsibility and OpenAI having operational responsibility. Masayoshi Son will be the chairman.
Arm, Microsoft, NVIDIA, Oracle, and OpenAI are the key initial technology partners. The buildout is currently underway, starting in Texas, and we are evaluating potential sites across the country for more campuses as we finalize definitive agreements.
That’s a lot of heavy hitters, but some of them (I’m looking at you Microsoft) have embraced wokeness. Hopefully their AI project won’t be infected with it.
If they need a technical writer, I know one who’s going to be available soon… (Update: I’m hearing it will be built out in Abilene.)
An end to flag madness. “State Department implements “one flag policy,” meaning no more Pride or BLM flags flown at U.S. facilities.”
CNN laid off 210 people or about 6% of it’s staff of 3,500. That still seems an unsustainably high staff for a network that averages less than a million viewers. Indeed, it’s something like 286 viewers per staffer. What advertisers are willing to pay money to reach so few people?
Developed between World War I and World War II by both the German and British armies, what came to be known as “blitzkrieg” (or “lightning war”) was a maneuver warfare doctrine in which the attacking force moves so fast that the enemy has a “nervous breakdown” because they’re always reacting too late to events that have already changed.
Trump is carrying out an executive order blitzkrieg, issuing so many executive orders so quickly to undo the damage of the Biden (and Obama) years. Today I want to highlight just a few related to border security and deporting the millions of unvetted illegal aliens the Biden Administration deliberately let into the country.
“On his first day in office, President Donald Trump began undoing the damage at the southwest border. Some of his first executive orders included declaring a national emergency at the border, establishing a process to designate cartels as Foreign Terrorist Organizations, and protecting America from invasion.”
When will border czar Tom Homan’s illegal alien roundups and deportations start? They’ve already started.
U.S. Immigration and Customs Enforcement officers arrested at least 308 illegal immigrants on President Donald Trump’s first full day in office, border czar Tom Homan announced Wednesday.
On Tuesday, immigration authorities began arresting hundreds of illegal immigrants who have committed violent crimes, including murder and rape. Over 1.4 million immigrants residing in the U.S. illegally will be prioritized in the early days of Trump’s second term.
“We’re concentrating on the worst first,” Homan told Fox & Friends host Lawrence Jones Wednesday morning, noting ICE is focusing on arresting “public safety threats” and “national security threats” as Trump promised.
“Some of them were murderers. Some of them were rapists. Some of them raped a child. Some sexually assaulted a child,” the border czar said of the 308 detainees.
National Review contacted DHS and ICE for comment on additional details of the arrested criminal aliens.
“ICE is doing their job” and “performing excellently right now out in the field,” Homan added.
On Monday, Trump declared a national emergency to secure the southern border and halt the historic surge of illegal immigrants that proliferated under former president Joe Biden for four years.
About 11 million immigrants were living in the U.S. illegally as of 2022, according to an April 2024 report from the Office of Homeland Security Statistics. That figure is likely higher now due to record border crossings under Biden.
Immigration raids in metropolitan cities are part of the new administration’s overarching vision for tackling illegal immigration.
Though it was initially reported raids would start in Chicago on Tuesday, the sanctuary city hasn’t seen much federal activity yet. Bracing for the expected raids, Chicago residents are largely staying inside, causing foot traffic in the city’s shopping district to drop by half.
Posing logistical challenges, the mass deportation operation needs detention centers to house illegal immigrants before they can be deported. ICE operates about 200 detention facilities across the U.S., but more may be needed. Large-scale deportations are expected to start as soon as this week.
Moreover, Trump authorized the deployment of up to 1,500 additional active-duty troops to the southern border on Wednesday. There are already roughly 2,200 troops in El Paso, Texas, the site of numerous border crossings in recent years.
Speaking with Fox News, Homan revealed there were 766 total apprehensions at the southern border in the last 24 hours since Trump took office. The border czar called the drastic shift in immigration policy a “game-changer.”
Trump has reinstated his highly successful remain in Mexico policy.
The CBP One app that the Biden admin used to fly over one million illegal aliens into America on domestic flights has been shut down. I wonder if the people who approved and developed an app that breaks federal immigration law can be charged.
On Monday, the new Trump Administration’s Department of Homeland Security (DHS) repealed a crucial memorandum from former DHS Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas that imposed severe limits on the capabilities of Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) agents to deport illegal aliens.
According to Fox News, the now-repealed memo from Mayorkas designated certain “protected areas” where ICE was not allowed to enforce immigration law, including the arrest and deportation of illegals. The order dictated that ICE was not allowed to interfere with illegal aliens’ “access to essential services or engagement in essential activities.” These “protected areas” included schools, churches, healthcare facilities, and food banks, among others.
“In our pursuit of justice, including in the execution of our enforcement responsibilities, we impact people’s lives and advance our country’s well-being in the most fundamental ways,” said Mayorkas at the time his original memo was issued. “As a result, when conducting an enforcement action, ICE and CBP agents and officers must first examine and consider the impact of where actions might possibly take place, their effect on people, and broader societal interests.”
“Going forward, law enforcement officers should continue to use that discretion along with a healthy dose of common sense,” the new Trump Administration memo declared. “It is not necessary, however, for the head of the agency to create bright line rules regarding where our immigration laws are permitted to be enforced.”
The order will allow ICE agents to go anywhere illegals may be, including schools and churches, for the purpose of apprehending and deporting them swiftly. President Trump has vowed to carry out the largest mass deportation operation in American history, with Border Czar Tom Homan admitting in an interview that ICE raids are already occurring across the country.
In addition to the expedited deportation efforts, a second memo from the Trump Administration’s DHS ordered a review of the use of “humanitarian parole,” which the Biden Administration used to allow hundreds of thousands of illegals into the country with no vetting.
It’s not just Mexico that’s agreed to take back illegal aliens. India is taking back 18,000 as well.
Democrats, of course, are making all sorts of noises about the raids are “illegal” and “unconstitutional,” issues they never seemed to raise while Biden was breaking the law flooding the country with illegal aliens.
The next steps should be adopting universal implementation of E-Verify for employment, and completely defunding all NGOs helping import illegals into America, including those involved in child sex trafficking.
The Trump administration took a sledgehammer to progressive diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives Tuesday night with executive orders designed to root racialist ideology out of the federal government and American institutions at large.
President Donald Trump signed an executive order overturning President Lyndon Johnson’s 1965 executive order creating race-based hiring requirements for federal contractors. Paired with that is a memo from the office of personnel management placing all DEI employees on leave and shutting down DEI programs and offices.
LBJ’s executive order was clearly unconstitutional and counter to the founder’s vision of individual equality under the law, but was thought at the time to be a necessary expedient to overcome decade of Jim Crow discrimination against black Americans. But there are few things more permanent than a “temporary” government program. Rescinding LBJ’s racist edict was long overdue, but expect the withered vine of Never-Trumpers to scream about “mah sacred norms and practices!” (At least I’m assuming that’s what they’re screeching. There’s too much real news to bother hunting for their reflexive pearl-clutching reactions. If a tree grifts in a forest when no one is around, does it make a sound?)
“President Trump campaigned on ending the scourge of DEI from our federal government and returning America to a merit based society where people are hired based on their skills, not for the color of their skin.
I seem to remember hearing a quote like this before.
This is another win for Americans of all races, religions, and creeds. Promises made, promises kept,” said White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt.
In addition to overturning affirmative action for contractors, Trump’s executive order declares DEI illegal and advises corporations and federally funded universities to end all illegal discrimination, with DEI falling under that umbrella.
Likewise, Trump took action to rid the Federal Aviation Administration of DEI hiring practices and return the agency to a merit-based system. Trump instructed the Secretary of Transportation and FAA administrator to end preferential hiring protocols for certain demographic criteria and revoke DEI programming inside the agency.
On Monday, Trump’s first day in office, he signed executive orders directing agencies to terminate DEI programs and review employment practices to root out DEI in all its forms. He also repealed the Biden administration’s “equity” executive order for the federal workforce and other executive actions meant to advance “equity” for minority groups.
Live by executive order, die by executive order. Die, DEI.
Trump’s executive actions have the potential to significantly reshape federal civil rights law and could spell the end of DEI across American institutions. Large corporations, elite universities, news organizations, and many other powerful facets of American business and culture adopted DEI during the summer 2020 Black Lives Matter riots and racial reckoning.
It was a grossly stupid and irresponsible decision then and it’s completely indefensible now.
Over the past few years, conservatives have waged a legal and political battle against DEI that started gaining traction after the Supreme Court ruled in 2023 that race-based college admissions programs violated the 14th Amendment. Conservative groups have filed a flurry of lawsuits alleging that corporate DEI programs violate anti-discrimination laws by explicitly creating programs for people with certain racial and gender characteristics.
And numerous courts have frequently and correctly ruled against such discriminatory behavior.
Numerous red states have also passed legislation outlawing DEI from universities and other public institutions.
More broadly, conservatives believe DEI programs obsessively focus on people’s immutable characteristics and assign blame to certain groups, rather than prioritizing individual character and meritocracy. DEI practitioners and proponents assert that it is necessary to make up for historical injustices to support people from marginalized backgrounds and train others to hold their same views.
Prior to Trump’s resounding electoral victory this past November, several large corporations including John Deere, Tractor Supply, Ford, and Lowe’s walked back DEI initiatives following conservative pressure. The slow corporate retreat from DEI continues after the election, with McDonald’s and Meta being among the companies to abandon DEI ahead of Trump’s inauguration.
Hopefully Trump’s executive order will spark the end of DEI’s slow retreat and begin its swift and complete rout.
